A Weblog by One Humble Bookman on Topics of Interest to Discerning Readers, Including (Though Not Limited To) Science Fiction, Books, Random Thoughts, Fanciful Family Anecdotes, Publishing, Science Fiction, The Mating Habits of Extinct Waterfowl, The Secret Arts of Marketing, Other Books, Various Attempts at Humor, The Wonders of New Jersey, the Tedious Minutiae of a Boring Life, Science Fiction, No Accounting (For Taste), And Other Weighty Matters.

Who Is This Hornswoggler?

Andrew Wheeler is a Vassar alum, class of 1990. He spent 16 years as a bookclub editor (mostly for the Science Fiction Book Club), and then moved into marketing. He marketed books and related products to accountants for Wiley for eight years, and now works for Thomson Reuters as Senior Marketer for Corporate Counsel. He was a judge for the 2005 World Fantasy Awards and the 2008 Eisner Awards. He also reviewed a book a day for a year twice. He lives with The Wife and two mostly tame sons (Thing One, born 1998; and Thing Two, born 2000) at an unspecified location in suburban New Jersey. He has been known to drive a minivan, and nearly all of his writings are best read in a tone of bemused sarcasm. Antick Musings’s manifesto is here. All opinions expressed here are entirely and purely those of Andrew Wheeler, and no one else.

Sunday, December 20, 2009

My two sons -- currently aged eight and eleven -- spend massive amounts of their free time these days watching YouTube. And that's fine.

But what they mostly watch is videogame walkthroughs, for games they don't own. And that's fine, too -- it's less fun than playing a game yourself, but I can see the appeal in finding out how it works.

Except that, a lot of the time, they seem to be watching walkthroughs by teenagers -- only slightly older, though much whinier, than they are -- who aren't any good at the game. After several jump-cuts, to obscure the fact that "TtlDminor07" just got killed three times, and repeated voiceovers like "Wait, what's that doing there. Ah, man, stop it! I'm down to seven guys! Just stop, OK? I'm going to have to do this part again...", I begin to wonder why my boys are watching this.

Is there any point to watching bad walkthroughs, or are my boys just still so young that they have seemingly infinite free time and nothing constructive to do with it?----------------Listening to: The Long Blondes - I'm Going To Hellvia FoxyTunes

James: I know that when I've looked for walkthroughs, I always went for written ones, so I could print them and have them next to me in case I forget the "tap the third yellow rock twice, then jump four spaces to the left" sequence. But I thought I was just tediously old-fashioned.